Brighton trunk murders

[1] The first murder was discovered on 17 June 1934, when an unclaimed plywood trunk was noticed by William Joseph Vinnicombe at the left luggage office of Brighton railway station as he investigated a smell.

He alerted the police and Chief Inspector Robert (Bob) Donaldson opened the trunk to find the dismembered torso of a woman.

Chief Inspector Donaldson suspected a local abortionist named Massiah based on what was known about him and on Spilsbury's notes:Internal examination of the torso had not revealed the cause of death; the legs and feet found at King's Cross belonged to the torso; the victim had been well nourished; she had been not younger than twenty-one and not older than twenty-eight, had stood about five feet two inches, and had weighed roughly eight and a half stones; she was five months pregnant at the time of death.

Instead, the doctor wrote a list of names and "...it seemed to the policeman that the sun had gone in: all of a sudden the consulting room was a place of sombre shadows....".

[5] In 2020, the BBC One documentary Dark Land: Hunting the Killers suggested that George Shotton could be the murderer of the unidentified woman.

She had been a dancer and sex worker in London, where she had met Toni Mancini, aged 26, who had a criminal record, including theft and loitering, but who worked as a waiter and bouncer.

One argument occurred on 10 May 1934 at the Skylark café on the seafront, where Mancini worked, when a drunk Kaye accused him of being romantically involved with a teenage waitress called Elizabeth Attrell.

He put the trunk, with Kaye's non-dismembered body inside it, at the foot of his bed, covered it with a cloth and used it as a coffee table – in spite of the smell and leaking fluids, of which visitors complained.

During the investigation related to the unsolved trunk murder, police searched premises close to the station and stumbled upon Kaye's remains in Mancini's lodgings.

A graphologist confirmed the handwriting on the form for the telegram sent to Kaye's sister matched that on menus Mancini had written at the Skylark café.

Other witnesses, friends of Mancini, claimed he boasted in the days after the murder of giving his "missus" the biggest hiding of her life.

The testimony of Sir Bernard Spilsbury, whose illustrious career as Principal Home Office Pathologist was already in decline, was effectively demolished by the well-planned cross-examination and closing speech of Norman Birkett.

[12] The case was dramatised in a 1951 episode of Orson Welles' radio drama The Black Museum titled "The Hammerhead" (with the story being changed to reveal the victim's sister as the killer).